Beyond Nature

To start with i like to dedicate my first article here to those jewels of mankind whose ground breaking contemporary inventions and theories have revolutionized the way we think, the way we live, the way we conduct ourselves on this beautiful yet arrogant planet.

And it's not just for our (mankind) sakes that we want to remember them; it's also for the sake of all the living creatures from micro to macro , and perhaps their offspring not yet born.

Note: Actually, I wanted to give a noteworthy meaning to the template i have used here-then i got the idea to deal with the mystic questions (mentioned in the sidebar) that haunted me for a long time now. I suppose this is a rather good justification of the template.

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us

This Remarkable ArtWork consists of 100 most famous people (Click to view enlarged image)


Albert Einstein
(March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence, E = mc ². Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." In wider culture the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius.

Stephen Hawking
(born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the runaway popular science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.

Aristotle
(384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology.

Thomas Alva Edison
(February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb and large teamwork to the process of . Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass productioninvention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Archimedes
(c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. He is credited with designing innovative machines, including siege engines and the screw pump that bears his name. Modern experiments have tested claims that Archimedes designed machines capable of lifting attacking ships out of the water and setting ships on fire using an array of mirrors.

Galileo Galilei
(15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) a Tuscan (Italian) physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of science", and “the Father of Modern Science.”

Aryabhata
(AD 476 – 550) is the first in the line of great mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. Aryabhata is the father of the Hindu-Arabic number system which has become universal today. His most famous works are the Aryabhatiya (AD 499 at age of 23 years) and Arya-Siddhanta.

Neil Alden Armstrong
(born August 5, 1930) is a former American astronaut, test pilot, university professor, and United States Naval Aviator. He is the first person to set foot on the Moon. Armstrong's second and last spaceflight was as mission commander of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission on July 20, 1969. On this mission, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface and spent 2.5 hours exploring while Michael Collins remained in orbit in the Command Module. Armstrong is a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Manoj Night Shyamalan
(born August 6, 1970), known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Academy-award nominated Indian American writer-director of major studio films, known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots that usually climax with a twist ending. Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense, which was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Alfred Hitchcock
(13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) an iconic and highly influential British filmmaker and producer, who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres.

Subrahamanyan Chandrasekhar
October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995 was an Indian born American astrophysicist. He was a Nobel laureate in physics along with William Alfred Fowler for their work in the theoretical structure and evolution of stars. He was the nephew of Indian Nobel Laureate Sir C. V. Raman.

C.V.Raman
(7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist who was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the molecular scattering of light and for the discovery of the Raman effect, which is named after him.

Christopher Columbus
(1451 – May 20, 1506) was an Italian navigator, colonizer and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere. Though not the first to reach the Americas from Afro-Eurasia — preceded some five hundred years by Leif Ericson, and perhaps by others — Columbus initiated widespread contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans. The anniversary of Columbus' 1492 landing in the Americas (Columbus Day) is observed throughout the Americas and in Spain on October 12.

Srinivasa Ramanujan
(22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. With almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions in the areas of mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions. Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations) during his short lifetime.

Abdul Kalam
(October 15, 1931, Tamil Nadu, India) was the eleventh President of India, serving from 2002 to 2007. He is popularly known as the Missile Man of India for his work and is considered a progressive mentor, innovator and visionary in India.

Steven Spielberg
(born December 18, 1946) is an American film director and producer. Forbes magazine places Spielberg's net worth at $3 billion. In 2006, the magazine Premiere listed him as the most powerful and influential figure in the motion picture industry. Time listed him as one of the 100 Greatest People of the Century. In a career that spans almost four decades, Spielberg's films have touched many themes and genres. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, three of his films, Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park became the highest grossing films for their time.

Michael Faraday
(September 22, 1791 – August 25, 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher and , in the terminology of that time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetismelectrochemistry. Some historians science refer to him as the best experimentalist in the history of science. The SI unit of capacitance, the farad, is named after him.

Isaac Newton
(January 4, 1643 – March 31, 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian. His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.

Wright Brothers
Orville (19 August 1871 – 30 January 1948) and Wilbur on (16 April 1867 – 30 May 1912), were two Americans who are generally credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight17 December 1903. In the two years afterward, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed wing flight possible.

Nicolaus Copernicus
(February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543) was the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution.

Charles Robert Darwin
(12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, eminent as a collector and geologist, who proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life.

Louis Pasteur
(childbed), and he created the first (December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of disease. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fevervaccine for rabies. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness - this process came to be called pasteurization.

Alexander Graham Bell
(3 March 1847 – 2 August 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor and innovator who is widely credited with the invention of the telephone. His father, grandfather and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's workresearch on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices that eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. In reflection, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study. Bell's death, all telephones throughout the United States "stilled their ringing for a silent minute in tribute to the man whose yearning to communicate made them possible."

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706-April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat. As a scientist he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.

Neils Bohr
(October 7, 1885 – November 18, 1962) was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen.

Johannes Kepler
(December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and key figure in the 17th century astronomical revolution. He is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astrononomy. They also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation.

Max Planck
(April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist. He is considered to be the founder of quantum theory, and one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century.

Edwin Hubble
(November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He profoundly changed astronomers' understanding of the nature of the universe by demonstrating the existence of other galaxies besides the Milky Way. He also discovered that the degree of redshift observed in light coming from a galaxy increased in proportion to the distance of that galaxy from the Milky Way. This became known as Hubble's law, and would help establish that the universe is expanding.

James Clerk Maxwell
(13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist. His most significant achievement was the development of the classical electromagnetic theory, synthesizing all previous unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and even optics into a consistent theory.Maxwell's work in electromagnetism has been called the "second great unification in physics", after the first one carried out by Newton.

James Watson
(born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

Christiaan Huygens
(April 14, 1629 – July 8, 1695) was a Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist; born in The Hague as the son of Constantijn Huygens, a friend of René Descartes.Historians commonly associate Huygens with the scientific revolution. He is famous for his Wave Theory of Light.

Leonard Euler
(April 15, 1707 – September 18 1783) was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist who spent most of his life in Russia and Germany. Euler made important discoveries in fields as diverse as calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a mathematical function. Euler is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century and one of the greatest of all time. He is also one of the most prolific; his collected works fill 60–80 quarto volumes. A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master [i.e., teacher] of us all."

Marie Curie
(November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934) was a physicist and chemist of Polish upbringing and, subsequently, French citizenship. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the only person honored with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and the first female professor at the University of Paris.

John von Neumann
(December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century. The mathematician Jean Dieudonne called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek
(October 24, 1632 – August 30, 1723) was a Dutch tradesman and scientist from Delft, the Netherlands. He is commonly known as "the Father of Microbiology", and considered to be the first microbiologist.

Humphry Davy
(17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829) was a British chemist and inventor is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth elements, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. He invented the Davy lamp, which allowed miners to enter gassy workings. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture On Some Chemical Agencies of Electricity "one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry."

Har Gobind Khorana
(born January 9, 1922) is an Indian-American molecular biologist. He was awarded the Nobel prize (shared with Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg) in 1968 for his work on the interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis.

James Watt
(19 January 1736 – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both Britain and the world.

Bill Gates
(born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, USA) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world's third richest person (as of 2008), and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.

To know more Details about the Scientists mentioned above, search for the same in Wikipedia

A man who is contented with what he has done will never become famous for what he will do.

Despite some great efforts put into this article some errors might have crept in so i request the readers to kindly report them as a comment below.

Your Suggestions will be greatly entertained.

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